‘Tier 2 Cities’ Candidates More Employable’

The recent initiatives in the skills and job arena might not have resulted in radical changes but have surely kept the positivity flowing, indicate the results of 3rd India Skills Report 2016, a joint initiative by Wheebox & PeopleStrong, in collaboration with Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) and LinkedIn.

In its third season, the report captures the insights from the largest employability test that was spread out to 3000 educational campuses, assessing five lakh students across 29 states and seven union territories, from noteworthy educational universities and professional institutes in the country along with the India’s hiring intent survey that reached out to over 150 employers across 12 major sectors.

The study shows an improvement in employability which is 38.12 per cent, compared to the number of past two years – 37.22 per cent (2015) and 33.95 per cent (2014). The study notices an interesting trend where Tier 2 cities were found to be more employable (over 50 per cent candidates assessed were found employable) than Tier 1 cities (employability 30 per cent).

From the demand side, the study forecasts an overall increase of 14.5 per cent in the hiring intent from the current year to the next year. The sectors which will see maximum hiring are Retail, e-commerce, BFSI, Pharma, Telecom, manufacturing with an increase of over 20 per cent in the hiring numbers followed by BPO/KPO/ITeS Core sector, with an increase of more than 10 per cent. However, FMCG, Hospitality and Software & IT expect the hiring numbers to remain the same compared to last year. In domain-wise hiring, there will not be any significant mix of industry sectors, however interesting trends are observed in sector-wise domain preferences. BFSI forecasts a preference for management and bachelor degree while expecting a drop in hiring of ITI and Diploma candidates. The core sectors will see a decrease in hiring graduates, however, hiring of engineers will go up significantly. The consumer durable sector will double the vocational graduate hiring in comparison to last year. Another sector which will see a significant increase in hiring of vocational candidates is hospitality. However, the sector plans to reduce the intake of diploma graduates in the overall hiring mix.

The report also studied the correlation between age and employability. Out of total number of candidates in the age group of 18-21 years, 37 per cent scored more than 60 per cent and hence were part of the employable pool. For age group 22-25 years, this number was 31.59 per cent and for age group 26-29 years this number was 21.88 per cent.

Similar to last year, most of the industry sectors prefer younger workforce with about 80 per cent employers preferring to hire candidates of age 30 years and below. An interesting trend is the increase in preference of software industry towards candidates of age more than 30 years. This number has increased to over 23 per cent in this year’s survey.

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